Writing Journal #6

Figures and institutions satirized:

• Italian government- bankrupt, wasting money, unnecessarily grand, uses the Church as a resource
• The Church- domineering, greedy, sells favors, hypocritical
• Relationship between the church and the state- Church owns best of everything, best broken
• Italian state- churches and starving people, illiterate, no modern contrivances, all stone
• Priests- happy and comfortable while others are starving
• Medici- tyrants, blasphemous, ridiculously created self aggrandizing frescos (which the art world applauds), thieves and smugglers
• Art- saving tyrants from the oblivion that they deserve, groveling artists stooping to paint that, clouded beauty, admired junk
• Mary cult
• Beggars- everywhere, persistent
• People’s relationships to beggars- uncaring and very anti Christian, drive them away, esp. the friendless, orphaned and widowed.
• Dominican friars- dress silly, live on alms, “suffer” for their religion, incomprehensible, never wash, beg
• Italian work ethics- non existent- work for a few hours and then go home and do nothing.
• Papal States- paranoid, squalid, dense
• Government officials- dense, suspicious, pointless, don’t get jokes
• Relic worship- “bottled fragments of saints and not even a nail from the true cross”, ridiculous, hard to believe
• Ruins- moldy, decaying old buildings
• Modern Romans- slothful, superstitious, and ignorant
• Rome- unoriginal, discovered
• Insurance agents
• American women and fashions- silly, extravagant, wigs
• Italian men’s clothing-
• Italian’s bathing and washing habits- never wash their clothes and if they do they don’t wear the clean ones
• Italian Property ownership system- people don’t own the land unless they are priests or princes
• Over excess of soldiers and priests
• Treatment of Jews- treat them like dogs, cant work as they want, not given rights, shunned by Christians, live in ghettos, constantly cursed, humiliated
• Lack of free speech
• Reverence for ancestors- lack of change, stagnant, behind the times, plow with sharpened sticks
• Disbelief in that which they haven’t seen
• Strong outwardly enforced morals- my character is ruined! I have been branded a speaker of untruths!
• St Peter’s- huge, ornate, so big it looks small
• The Inquisition- compared to martyring Christians, brutal, hypocritical
• Modern theater/Coliseum- proper, opera glasses, snobbish, superfluous, sensationalist, unfeeling
• Modern Newspapers- hobnobbing, unfeeling, concerned with show, all knowing.
• Martyrs- over emphasized
• Michelangelo- monotonous, over emphasized, revered, monotonous, bore
• Tour guides- uncomprehending, fun to ridicule, Bad English, parroting, eager to please

Six Examples of Humor:

• “And now that my temper is up I may as well go on and abuse everybody I can think of”
• “One or two of those people who are so fond of writing their names in prominent places had been there before us- a million or two, I should think.”
• “But when they showed us the print of Peter’s face in the hard stone of the prison wall and said he made it by falling up against it”
• Of a playbill found in the Coliseum “There was a suggestive smell of mint drops about it still, a corner had evidently been chewed, and on the margin, these words were written in a delicate female hand:”
• “The whole to conclude with a chaste and elegant

GENERAL SLAGHTER!”

• “Marcus Marcellus Valerian (stage name- his real name is Smith)”
• “‘’Gyptian mummy!’ ‘Ah, just so. Frenchman, I presume?’”